Taste Safe Moon Sand Recipe

How to Make Moon Sand: Make this taste safe homemade moon sand with this easy recipe for a fantastic sensory play experience for kids, using just 3 simple ingredients!

Easy sensory ideas are by far one of my family’s favorite go-to activities. From sensory bins to easy sensory recipes we absolutely adore it all! For awhile now Livia has been wanting to give making moon sand a try, but every recipe I was finding online either called for baby oil or powdered tempera paint and quite honestly we didn’t have either of those items in our cabinets and they never really made the shopping list…so this project was continually put off.

And then one day we had a choice of moving an open 5lb bag of flour with us or figuring out what to do with it. So this experiment began. This moon sand recipe is made of three very common household items, is taste-safe, and turned out absolutely vibrant!

Items Needed to Make Taste Safe Moon Sand:

How to Make Moon Sand:

We used canola oil instead of baby oil to make our moon sand taste safe. This does not mean that it tastes good or even that it should be eaten by the handful. It just means that if your little one were to take a bite or two, that child would be perfectly fine.

To make our moon sand we used a ratio of 1:8 (1 cup of oil per 8 cups of flour). This worked out to using 2 cups of flour and 1/4 cup of canola oil to make each color.

To start I measured out the oil into four different bowls and added in our food dye (I used about 8 drops of McCormick). Using a whisk I mixed up everything really well. Since our food dye was not oil based it beaded, but it still colored the flour beautifully. Keep your food dye out just in case you need to add more once you add in your flour.

Once your food dye is broken up into small beads add in your flour and mix with a fork. If more food dye is needed don’t be afraid to add it directly to your flour. It will make those spots a tad darker than the rest. My kids thought it gave the moon sand a fun sparkle look.

Once all the colors were mixed I lined them up in our sensory bin and gave the kids the kitchen tools we had used to make the moon sand (along with some additional sensory play toys). The kids had a blast scooping, molding, dumping, and making a lovely mess.

This did end up everywhere! But it was incredibly easy to sweep up and brush off.

Eventually Meatball dragged the entire sensory bin into the backyard to make mud pies with! This activity kept my kids entertained all afternoon and was beyond cheap on the pocketbook! By the time it came time to put the bin away we didn’t have any left to save…although we had mud pies to spare!

So, I am not entirely sure how well this would store, but I would imagine that as long as it is kept dry and inspected prior to play something like this would be able to be stored in a ziplock.

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